


You May Render Me a Wreck

by wtvoc



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: post episode spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-28
Updated: 2015-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-23 21:37:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4893226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wtvoc/pseuds/wtvoc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hook reflects on his life in the aftermath of Emma embracing her role as the Dark One. Spoilers for 5.01.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You May Render Me a Wreck

“You were the most pathetic thing I ever laid eyes on,” Killian tells the prone form of Rumplestiltskin. His voice is low as he speaks—almost a whisper, but he has too much anger, too much sadness in him to prevent the emotion from roughening the words pouring from his gullet like a confession. 

“I can remember being utterly _offended_ that a man who looked like you was married to such a one as Milah. It nearly made me question my devotion to her. You were... insipid and mewling. Sorry. I felt _sorry_ for you,” he chuckled, nearly leaning down to see if the puff of his breath across the former Dark One's face elicited any sort of reaction, but the small man lying in the back of his own establishment made no movement, did not flinch or give any indication that he was other than in perpetual sleep—a “coma,” they'd called it. 

He heard a noise out in the shop and paused, sitting up in a rush and preparing to come up with some sort of excuse for why he was there, alone with the one person that was the reason he'd lived so long. Three hundred some-odd years, looking for the Dark One. Killian Jones was only alive because of the Dark One. 

Funny, that. It was what brought him here in the first place. Some errant thought of his when he was trying to force numbing mindlessness, and there it was, taunting him: 

_You're in love with the Dark One now, mate._

“I no longer wish you death,” he tells his old crocodile, this time managing to whisper straight into his ear. “I can see now why you were thus.” He closes his eyes and listens, certain there is someone headed his way, so he rises from the man, the arbiter of his near-destruction, and slips out the back. He blindly stumbles along, wondering where to go. 

As if it mattered. 

Emma no longer loved him. He didn't know what he'd done, but he could see it in her eyes—familiar eyes, eyes he'd seen dozens of times. 

Not _her_ eyes, of course; the eyes of the Dark One. But what was the difference now? Clear and cold, which made it all worse, of course. No darkness clouding her formerly searing green gaze; no reptilian cast to them, making her seem a different person. No, when Emma had looked at him with such...dispassionate dismissal, it had been the same chilling gaze he had been fixed with time and time again. 

_Time_ , he chuckled inwardly as he made his way to...nowhere. He was ever time's bitch, as they said in this realm. 

The woman he loved was still in there, he knew it. But it gave a pirate pause, he had to admit—what in the name of the gods had they done to tip her into fully embracing the darkness? Was it some rash decision? Something her parents had done? He couldn't imagine it being something the boy had done. Regina, perhaps? Him? He couldn't decide whether it was terribly egocentric of him to believe it had been he who had done it, but this woman he loved who had once claimed to love him—she no longer had love in her eyes. It made sense that it was some betrayal perpetrated by him, did it not? 

If so-- _what the hell did he do_? Could he fix it? 

These were all questions he'd been asking himself for days now, ever since they had touched down in Storybrooke, none except Emma having any idea what had passed. Whether they had all somehow plotted against her (he doubted that, most sincerely), whether there had been some grand plan to remove the darkness that had failed utterly (likely). 

Whether he, specifically, had failed her. It would hardly be the first time that his love was not enough to keep the woman he loved safe from the foul machinations of the Dark One. He figured that was the most likely scenario, and it had simply spiraled from there. Killian Jones fails the woman he loves, and everyone else's small failures chip away at her, like a ship's hull torn asunder by one well-aimed cannonball. Perhaps they tried to bail the water out to no avail; perhaps Emma had been desperate to keep herself from sinking. Perhaps she had beseeched him to save her; he couldn't wonder that he failed. 

Would he ever be enough? 

As he strides away to no place in particular, his thoughts morose, he chuffs a bit of laughter as he answers his own questions. No. It never stops him from trying, of course; hard-headedness was ever his downfall. That and rashness. Liam had told him this often enough. He has wondered over the years (and years and years and years) what the point is of living so long, and that the answer only comes to him now is perhaps a bit of cosmic irony—it took centuries of failing at vengeance against the Dark One to see that perpetually failing with the Dark One _is_ his purpose. He is the foil of the darkness, plain and simple. 

How wonderful that he's so good at it, then. 

He idly thinks that if he's the foil of darkness then it means that he must be light, but the thought brings him no pleasure. Not when his _Swan_ is supposed to be the light. She is supposed to be the hero; he's rather terrible at it. The last time he tried to be a hero, he lost his brother. It's why he'd given up on it. Sure, he had succeeded recently and in small doses, but that was with Emma at his side. She did not seem inclined to be there anymore. 

He makes his way through town, realizing his feet have taken him to the harbor, ever his haven. But as he stares out toward the horizon, neither feeling the pull of the ocean nor being soothed by the soft slap of waves rolling toward him, he sighs. Wonders where Emma is at this moment. Wonders who it will be who pulls her from this darkness, for it certainly won't be him, no matter how hard he tries. He knows he will continue to try, and there is comfort in that sort of knowing, but as he dismisses the sudden urge to simply board his ship and sail far, far away, he knows that he needs to become inured to the insistent pain gnawing at his insides, the one telling him that he won't be enough this time. 

He may not be enough, but it won't stop him from trying. And if Emma really has succumbed to the darkness completely, then perhaps he ought to do so as well. 

**Author's Note:**

> title is from a lyric on the decemberist's "hazards of love" album, the song "annan water."


End file.
